'It’s very difficult to live in here and it’s not safe,' says Yacob Mechrian Mandabayan. Photograph: Freedom Flotilla

Former Liberal MP Judi Moylan has hit out at the Abbott government over its treatment of seven West Papuan asylum seekers who arrived by boat in the Torres Strait last month.

The seven, including a woman and a 10-year-old child, told customs officials when they landed in Australia on 24 September that they feared for their lives after taking part in a protest against Indonesian human rights abuses in West Papua. But their claims for asylum were ignored and they were swiftly deported to neighbouring Papua New Guinea, where they were handed over to local immigration officials.

Moylan described the move as “extraordinary”.

“I mean, we’ve just completely trashed our commitment to the UN [refugee] convention and to the convention on human rights,” she told Guardian Australia.

“We’re not even offering to share part of the burden with some of the poorest countries in our region now. We’re saying: we won’t allow any asylum seeker who comes by boat to set foot on our territory.”

The West Papuans have since been transferred to a settlement near the PNG-Indonesian border where a community of West Papuan refugees lives a mostly subsistence existence, too afraid to return home but without citizenship rights in PNG.

Guardian Australia spoke with one of the group, Yacob Mechrian Mandabayan, on Monday night.

“This place is not like detention centre,” he said on the phone from the remote PNG camp. “It’s hard for everything: it's hard for food, hard for transport, hard for clean water and power, it’s very hard to find a toilet here.”

At the camp, Mandabayan said the group had been placed in a house that had not been occupied in six years and was in a state of disrepair. He said they were afraid because the settlement was so close to the Indonesian border and there was no security or police officers. “It’s very difficult to live in here and it’s not safe,” he said.

Judi Moylan was one of a “gang of four” Coalition MPs who spoke out against the former Howard government’s increasingly draconian border policy in 2005.

In 2006, after 43 West Papuans arrived in an outrigger canoe and successfully sought asylum in Australia, the Howard government tried to quell a backlash from Indonesia by expanding its offshore processing regime to prevent similar incidents.

Moylan gave a speech to parliament in response, in which she described diplomatic pressure from the Indonesian government over the West Papuan asylum seekers as “offensive to our style of democratic government and to the rule of law which underpins it”.